docker-upx's Introduction

docker-upx

Lightweight UPX docker image

Usage

docker run --rm -w $PWD -v $PWD:$PWD quay.io/kkh913/upx:latest --best --lzma -o app.out ./app

Why do we need to make the container image size smaller?

Reducing the size of the container image allows agile service deployment and spatial-efficient image registry management. To do this, here are two things:

Use of lightweight base image

It is common to distribute binary files inside a container as static-linked to remove dependencies. In our case, using a scratch image is more advantageous than the well-known default images busybox and alpine.
Reduced executable file size

UPX is the most well-known executable file packer. Since the compression ratio is usually significant between 50% ~ 70%.

Compare container size with other docker-upx projects

➜ docker images
REPOSITORY           TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED          SIZE
quay.io/kkh913/upx   latest    6b16e64aceaa   17 minutes ago   428kB
gruebel/upx          latest    3c533895a64b   3 years ago      1.7MB
lalyos/upx           latest    6fdc9a8475ac   5 years ago      1.15MB

Comments

As a result, there is only a difference in container size - negligible(🤔) . And, each docker-upx has the same compression ratio and performance. But, I think that many drops make a shower in our container clusters.

lalyos/upx

Single stage Build
- ADD his own static-linked upx released on GitHub
- Packing
Fixed version 3.91

gruebel/upx

Multi stage build
- 1st stage
  - build his own static-linked upx
- 2nd stage
  - copy upx to busybox
Dynamic version -> dev = latest but unstable

quay.io/kkh913/upx

Multi stage build
- 1st stage
  - Find official latest release upx using GitHub API and download it
- 2nd stage
  - Extract *.tar.xz
- 3rd stage
  - Copy upx to scratch
No packing process
- Official release is already packed
Dynamic version -> latest and stable